Cursed to Death

by Bill Crider

  Twenty years later, when Gorman died, the school, not having grown very much, was taken over by his denomination. Eventually, new buildings were added and more students came, but the school remained small and isolated, known mostly for its occasional powerhouse basketball teams. Nothing very remarkable ever happened there, no Rhodes scholars got sent to Britain, no astronauts were graduated. Hartley Gorman College remained a quiet, undistinguished school, safe from its founder’s three bugaboos, or relatively safe at least—a place that few, if any, outside the state had ever heard of. It stayed that way for a long, long time.

  Chapter 1

  During the ten-minute break between his nine and ten o’clock classes, Carl Burns sat in his office working on his list of things he hated. He had just written down Dental floss that shreds between your back teeth and was starting on People who fart in elevators when his student secretary walked into his office.

  His secretary’s name—her honest-to-God name, right there on all her official records and, Burns supposed, on her birth certificate as well—was Bunni. With an i. Burns shuddered to think what her parents must be like. He hoped he’d never have to meet them.

  Aside from her name, however, Bunni had certain assets; assets of the kind to make male professors—even male professors at Hartley Gorman College—snap their heads around in the hallways. There was her flawless, creamy skin. Her long blonde hair. Her blue, blue eyes. Her pneumatic breasts. Only two things restrained Burns from leaping across his massive brown executive desk and attempting to rip off her skintight Gloria Vanderbilts with his teeth: (1) He would certainly be fired for moral turpitude, and (2) she chewed gum. People who chew gum in public were high on the list Burns was working on.

  “Hi, Dr. Burns,” Bunni said, giving her gum a good workout. Juicy Fruit. Burns particularly hated the odor of Juicy Fruit gum. “Dean Elmore called while you were in class.”

  Burns looked up at her and then down his list. He drew a line through the word People, which was as far as he’d gotten with the sentence he’d begun earlier, and wrote Dean Elmore in his neat, precise hand. Then he drew a long, looping arrow from Elmore’s name to near the top of the list, the arrowhead pointing to the space between People who talk aloud in movie theaters and Days when the humidity is more than 40%.

  He put the cap on his black-ink-filled Pilot Precise Ball Liner and looked back up at Bunni. “And what did the Dear Departed say that he wanted to see me about?”

  A cloud crossed the clear blue sky of Bunni’s eyes. Burns knew that he was wrong to joke about Elmore’s appearance with her, since Bunni seldom understood a joke. Besides, Elmore almost certainly hadn’t said what he wanted, one of his favorite tactics being to instill doubt in anyone he could, at any time, about anything at all.

  But this time Burns was surprised. Not only had Elmore left a message, Bunni had remembered it. “It was just a reminder call,” she said. “About the luncheon today.”

  “Ah,” Burns said. “The luncheon: Thank you, Bunni, for bringing that message. You run along to class now. I’ll be in soon.” Bunni was in his ten o’clock American literature class. “Today I’m going to give you a list of ten characteristics of Romanticism. You get ready to write them down.”

  Bunni’s eyes cleared. “Yes, sir,” she said, and left the office.

  Burns smiled. One of the things he liked about Hartley Gorman College was the fact that the students there still knew how to say “sir” with some degree of sincerity. One of the things he didn’t like was the Friday “luncheons,” supposedly a time for the academic dean to hear reports from the various department heads, but mostly a time for Elmore to berate, humiliate, and castigate his staff instead. It was not an event that Burns looked forward to with eager anticipation. In fact he felt a lot like a man Mark Twain had described, a man who was about to be hanged, who said that if it weren’t for the honor of the thing, he’d just as soon skip it.

  Burns gathered up the textbook and his notes from the top of his desk. Then he opened the wide, thin drawer in the middle of the desk and tossed in his list of things he hated. He could work on it some more later in the day. He tossed in the black Pilot, too. For his class rolls, he used a Paper Mate Power Point that Bunni had given him for Christmas the year before.

  He wondered who would get the reaming at the luncheon later that day. Burns couldn’t recall having done anything himself, but at dear old Hartley Gorman College, you didn’t actually have to be guilty of doing something to get a reaming. That was another of Elmore’s tactics. He liked to keep people off balance.

  As Burns stood wondering, the bell rang to signal the beginning of class. He could reach his classroom in seconds, but the route was complicated. His office was on the third floor of the school’s original building, now almost ninety years old. Its official designation was “Hartley Gorman I”—all the buildings were, for some reason, numbered—but it was called simply “Main” by almost everyone—except, of course, for Elmore, who prided himself on knowing the numbers of all the buildings and who never referred to them any other way. Burns’s office was Main 301, slightly isolated since it was in what appeared to have been designed originally as an elevator shaft.

  Burns didn’t mind that his office stuck out on the side of the building above one other office and an entryway. What he minded was what was over his head, and the maze he had to run to get to class. Main’s third floor, which had served as the college’s chapel in its early years, had been remodeled for the Psychology Department some years before and eventually inherited by the English Department when psych moved to newer, plusher quarters.

  Burns had to leave his office, go through a narrow hallway past the usually open doors of two small classrooms (used as observation rooms by psych), turn left, walk past two tiny offices, turn left, turn right again almost immediately, cross a wide hall, and enter his classroom. A rat could hardly run the maze any better.

  The Psych Department was also responsible for what was over Burns’ head when he sat at his desk—namely, hundreds of pounds of pigeon shit. Burns had been assured by Mal Tomlin that the shit was real. “See,” Mal had said, puffing madly on his hundred-millimeter cigarette, “the Psych guys had to have pigeons for their experiments. So they left the attic windows open and put out grain up there. Then when they needed a few pigeons, they’d go up and club ‘em. I’ve been up there, kid. I know what I’m talking about. If that ceiling of yours ever collapses while you’re in the chair behind your desk, you’ll be five feet deep in the stuff. Don’t count on me to dig you out. I expect they’ll just lock your office door and put a little plaque on it, like they did in the song for Big Bad John.”

  Burns was never sure when Mal was lying, but he was never very comfortable sitting in his office. Well, he couldn’t worry about that now. He walked into his class, checked the roll, and began his list. The students were ready for him, and they began taking down everything he said.

  After class, Burns stopped in the first office on his way back, the office of Clementine Nelson. She was “Clem” to everyone except Elmore, who had the irritating habit of calling everyone by his or her complete Christian name when he deigned to use the Christian name at all.

  Clem was a compact woman of about fifty with short hair that she brushed straight back from her face. She had very clear brown eyes, and she always wore severely tailored skirts and blouses in tones of khaki and brown. She looked to Burns like a retired semipro shortstop.

  Clem was at her desk grading papers. Burns leaned in the door frame. “I really punished them today,” he said.

  Clem looked up. “Another one of your famous lists?”

  “Right. You should have seen them taking it down. You would have thought it was the holy writ.”

  Clem laid down her red pen on the stack of papers. “You remember what it was like ten or fifteen years ago? Always questions. Those kids really kept you on your toes.”

  “I remember,” Burns said. “Now the only question anyone has is ‘How will all
this help me get a better job and make over fifty thousand a year?’”

  “What do you tell them?”

  “I used to tell them that anything that made them more human was worth studying for its own sake and that money didn’t mean as much as they thought it did. Some of them even believed me.”

  “But what do you tell them now?”

  “Now I don’t tell them anything. The smart ones will figure it out for themselves.”

  “Ha.” Burns couldn’t interpret the “Ha,” so he didn’t say anything.

  “You have your weekly meeting today?” Clem asked.

  “As usual,” Burns said. “Neither rain, nor hail, nor dark of night . . .”

  “. . . shall keep you from your appointed scolding,” Clem said. “Give Elmore my love.”

  “Naturally,” Burns said. Clem and Elmore had been involved in a difference of opinion in a committee meeting three years before, shortly after Elmore’s appointment as dean. Elmore had addressed the faculty, emphasizing his open-mindedness and his ability to see both sides of a question. “We can agree to disagree,” he said. Three days later, Clem had disagreed. Thirty minutes after that, Elmore had gone to the president and tried to get her fired. The fact that he had not succeeded had only increased his dislike of her.

  Burns pushed away from the door frame, took two steps, stuck his head in the next office, said “Hello, Miss Darling,” and kept going. Miss Darling, as far as Burns knew, seldom spoke to anyone. She was long past the regular retirement age, and Burns thought she was quite dotty. He knew of at least one freshman comp class that she had entered and proceeded to teach a lesson on Shakespeare that was supposed to be taught in her sophomore British literature class. The freshmen sat politely through it all. Burns had mentioned Miss Darling to Elmore in his faculty evaluation memo, but Elmore had done nothing. Elmore, in fact, loved Miss Darling, who never spoke up in faculty meetings, never crossed anyone up in committees, and never questioned any administrative decision, no matter how lunatic it may have seemed to the rest of the faculty. Miss Darling could go on teaching the wrong lesson to the wrong class well into the next century and Elmore would never dream of replacing her.

  Another two steps and Burns had turned the corner to the hall leading to his own office. Waiting inside was Earl Fox, chairman of the History Department, which was housed on the second floor. “Got any matches?” Earl asked.

  “I think so,” Burns said, walking past Fox and around his desk. He opened the drawer into which he’d tossed his list and rummaged around until he found a matchbook advertising Hernando’s Fine Mexican Food. He handed it to Fox.

  “Let’s go down for a smoke,” Fox said.

  Fox and Burns had come to Hartley Gorman College the same year, 1973, a time when English and history teachers were a dime a dozen, a time when there were often hundreds of applicants for every job that opened. They had been hired at HGC simply because many people had never heard of the place, and many others didn’t think they could work under the restrictive conditions of a denominational school. Still others thought they were too good to waste away in a tiny college of no prestige located hundreds of miles from anywhere on the eastern edge of West Texas.

  The rules, however, were not really as restrictive as people sometimes thought. Smoking, for instance, was permitted on campus; but Fox didn’t like to be seen smoking. He and Burns generally smoked in the history lounge, a small, unused office on the second floor.

  As they walked down the stairs, Fox said, “Thank God the football season’s over.”

  “It hasn’t been over long enough,” Burns said. In fact, the HGC Panthers had lost their last game of the season only the previous Saturday, by a score of forty-eight to nothing. They had also lost the ten previous games, most of them by a similar score. Each passing week had seen Elmore’s comments in the weekly luncheon grow more scathing as he addressed the coach, who was also the head of the Physical Education Department.

  No one was in the history lounge when they reached it. No one usually was. The room was small and bleak, with the paint peeling off the walls, and it was lit by a single hundred-watt bulb hanging at the end of a fraying brown fabric-covered cord that dangled from the twelve-foot ceiling. The furnishings consisted entirely of items that Fox had picked up at garage sales: an ancient card table with the blue lamination peeling from its cardboard top, three steel chairs even older than the table, and a ghastly floral couch with a missing cushion, covered with unidentifiable stains.

  Fox loved garage sales, and he usually looked as if he bought all his clothes at them. Today he was wearing a pair of double-knit pants decorated with huge windowpane checks of brown, green, red, and gray, a knit shirt with a penguin on the pocket, and a Dallas Cowboys windbreaker. One of the windbreaker pockets had been partially ripped away, there were ink stains on the shirt, and the fly of the pants would zip only about three-quarters of the way to the top. All of this was in distinct contrast with Fox’s head and face. His clean-cut features and razor-cut hair would not have looked out of place in a preppie handbook.

  Fox closed the door of the lounge as Burns sat down in one of the steel chairs. Then Fox sat in one of the other chairs and pulled out a crumpled pack of L & Ms from the unripped pocket of the windbreaker. He offered the pack to Burns, who took one, more to be companionable than because he wanted to smoke. Burns never smoked except when he was with Fox or Mal Tomlin.

  They lit up with Burns’ matches and smoked in silence for a minute, tapping their ashes into a red and white Diet Coke can that sat in the middle of the card table. They knew that there was little likelihood that they would be disturbed. Dean Elmore had long ago made known in an open faculty meeting his opinions about “the malcontent mutterings of lugubrious lounge lizards,” and shortly thereafter the lounge once used by the general faculty had been converted into a meeting place for the student government.

  “You know, you’re right,” Fox said, taking a deep drag on his L & M. “Elmore will probably let Coach Thomas have it again today. I hate to say it, but I guess that’s better than one of us getting a going-over.”

  Burns tapped ashes into the Coke can. He knew what Fox meant. Elmore had several times made scathing remarks about Fox’s wardrobe and attacked the History Department in general for its “low standards of personal conduct,” which Burns interpreted to mean that Elmore knew that Fox smoked in the history lounge. “E pluribus unum,” Burns said.

  “Don’t give me that crap,” Fox said, dropping his cigarette butt into the can and reaching into his pocket for the pack. “You know as well as I do that there’s no unity around here. Everyone is just looking for some way to stick it to somebody else. Nobody’s interested in anything except saving his own job.” He lit the cigarette that he had shaken out of the pack. “Present company excepted, of course.” He blew out a long plume of smoke.

  “Of course,” Burns said, dropping his own butt into the can. He was well aware that HGC was working under strict budget limitations. In the past few years, there had been a considerable drop in enrollment, mostly due to Elmore, in Burns’ opinion, and there was a concerted effort under way to reduce the size of the faculty. And Elmore had a pretty good idea of whom he wanted to send away.

  Fox pushed back his chair and propped his feet up on the table, a precarious proposition. He seemed quite comfortable, however. Burns noted that he was wearing a pair of Hush Puppies that had probably never been brushed. They were the dirtiest Hush Puppies that Burns had ever seen. The sole of the left shoe had separated from the upper at the toe. “Heard the latest?” Fox asked after achieving a satisfactory balance.

  “Probably not,” Burns said. He was pretty sure that he was always the last to hear any of the campus gossip. Once when a math teacher had been fired, the man had been gone for three months before Burns even heard about the incident.

  “L. J.’s got a job at North Texas State,” Fox said.

  L. J. was L. J. Hitt, a psychology teacher whom Burns knew slightly.
“How’d he luck into that?” Burns asked.

  “Don’t know,” Fox said. “All I know is that he’s leaving at midterm.”

  “How many does that make now?”

  “Right at forty,” Fox said.

  “Hard to believe,” Burns said, shaking his head. “Give me another cigarette.”

  Fox handed him the pack and Burns lit up, thinking about the forty or so faculty members who had been fired, quit, resigned, or retired since Elmore’s ascendancy to the deanship.

  “Why don’t we leave?” Fox asked. It wasn’t a rhetorical question.

  “Four reasons,” Burns said through a haze of cigarette smoke. “One: We’re having too much fun. Two: We can’t believe Elmore would really fire us. Three: In our fields, it’s almost impossible to find jobs. And four: We don’t have the guts.”

  “You and your damned lists,” Fox said. “I guess that about covers it, though. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to look around.”

  “I look in the job vacancies section of the Chronicle of Higher Education every two weeks,” Burns said. “Don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Fox said. “For all the good it does.”

  “I’ll tell you how mine read,” Burns said. “‘Position for specialist in American literature. Non-tenure track. Prestigious publications required. Ph.D. required. Load will consist of five courses in freshman composition. Some off-campus teaching’—that means you get to teach in the local units of the Texas penal system—’required. Salary, seventeen five to eighteen five per year, depending on experience.”

  “I think you’re probably exaggerating,” Fox said. “But not by much.”

  “Not much at all,” Burns said, dropping his second butt in the Coke can. “Let’s go to the luncheon.”

  Chapter 2